Printing webpages
Waste of paper
Not all websites offer “print-friendly” versions. As a result, you may find that the right-hand side of a webpage is printed on a separate sheet, only one line is printed on a new sheet, or there’s lots of superfluous information. Obviously, this can lead to a great deal of wasted paper.
Tip. When launching a print job in your browser, it’s a good idea to check out the print preview first. The print options also allow you to print only a selection of the webpage, and this can improve results. If you’re still not satisfied, you can install a dedicated print tool.
Printfriendly
Printfriendly (http://www.printfriendly.com) is a 100% Web-based service, so there’s no need to install any software. Surf to the Printfriendly website and enter the URL of the webpage you want to print. The page will be shown without any extras such as ads, banners, etc. Note. During our tests, quite a lot of text disappeared on some pages and we sometimes received an error message.
Tip. Printfriendly also offers a handy bookmarklet which you should drag to your Favourites or Bookmarks toolbar in your browser. It lets you strip a webpage without having to surf to the Printfriendly website first.
Options
In the menu bar at the top, you can specify that you want all images to be removed. Alternatively, you can click on any individual graphic or other element to have it removed. When you let the mouse cursor hover over the text, you will see that it is split up into several orange boxes, allowing you to easily delete paragraphs. However, these boxes are not always composed logically: for instance they sometimes stop smack in the middle of a sentence. If you’ve been too zealous and deleted too much, the Undo button can put this right. Moreover, you can modify the size of the text font, which is by default set to medium.
You can print the final result by clicking on the Print button. Unfortunately, there’s no print preview to tell you exactly how many pages will be printed. Conveniently, you can save the stripped webpage directly as a PDF file, but the e-mail function didn’t work in our test.
FinePrint
A second solution is to install an extra printer driver, e.g. FinePrint (http://www.fineprint.com), which opens a preview for each print job. If there are several pages, right-clicking allows you to specify which pages should be excluded; there is an option for removing graphics too. Finally, you can force large webpages to be printed on one sheet.
Tip. This tool is available for all your Windows print jobs, including large Excel spreadsheets. And FinePrint also allows you to print economical miniature pages (two, four or eight on one sheet), whilst the “double-sided printing” option is a great paper saver. FinePrint costs $50 or about £25.70 - there’s a free trial version, but it prints a banner on every sheet.
How about Flash?
A final note. Neither Printfriendly nor FinePrint succeeded in stripping Flash webpages of superfluous elements.
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